Rockford Installs Its Third ‘Traffic Calming’ Device

To use the Goldilocks analogy, the city hopes they have found their mama bear of traffic calming devices. 

The intersection of Brendenwood and Chelsea has been undergoing a bit of an experiment over the past few months. It has been a problem area for speeders for quite some time now and the city has been looking at unique ways to fix it.

They didn't want to just put another stop sign in. It's annoying to drivers and people will just find another way around them. Speed bumps were a no go because of emergency vehicles and snow plows. So the city has been trying out 3 different traffic calming devices.

The first one was a little traffic circle. This was a bit too big for the intersection and it seems that the city of Rockford really, REALLY hates traffic circles. Then they tried to "bump out"  the corners to slow people down. These were ineffective in my opinion because when they were big enough to actually slow people down it became hard to maneuver around the corners and when they were small enough to navigate comfortably, they really didn't slow down much traffic.

These new "mini medians" might just do the trick though. I've gone through them a few times now and they're easy to navigate and they definitely slow people down.

Congrats to Alderman Chad Tuneberg, you might have a winner here.

Check out the video below to hear Alderman Tuneberg discuss the project.